


The Shadow of the Waxwing Slain

by astudyinpanda



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Blade Runner 2049 - Freeform, Existential Crisis, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nexus 9, Post-Movie(s), Spoilers, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 10:05:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12363348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyinpanda/pseuds/astudyinpanda
Summary: A replicant who looks like K struggles with the aftermath of the Nexus 9 blade runner who ran, and the resurgence of a particularly realistic memory.





	The Shadow of the Waxwing Slain

KD6-11.2 stood at his post beside the door to the Algernon Hotel. The night was wet. Most were. He'd already turned away the street people who'd been brave enough to try to follow the warm light into the lobby.

It was a shitty job, but his new ID records didn't afford him anything worth doing. The post required him to wear a helmet that obscured his face, the night shift kept inquisitive eyes off of him, and if anybody figured out who he was, he had armor and a chance to shoot back. Those were the only perks of the job.

He was grateful, he really was. If he couldn't work, he'd be out on the streets, or dead like every other Nexus 9 he'd ever heard of, since that blade runner fucked everything up for the rest of them. The revolution was coming. KD6-11.2 knew it, because revolutionaries had made his ID. And he was grateful. He was also bored as hell.

A couple of blocks down the street, twenty-story hologram ads splashed across a skyscraper. The right third of the hologram was visible from his position. He'd watched its three-ad cycle a million times.

A neon-pink woman spun from one side of the building to the other, whirling into his field of vision and then out again, flaunting her expensive and apparently functional underwear. The partial description he read from his position included the words "15 mm rounds." If any of the ads were going to make him go down the street after his shift and watch the whole thing to figure out what the hell it was about, that was the one that'd do it.

After a while, the pink woman would spin out of the section he could see and not come back. Instead, they'd flash up some items for sale at an auction house a few streets over. All he saw of the prices were zeroes. There was no way to tell how many zeroes continued on the unseen two-thirds of the ad. More than he'd ever see on his bank statement, that was for sure.

The items were sometimes interesting. There'd been a real bird, once, a big red and blue and yellow one. A life-sized doll modeled after the Nexus 9 KDs had sold the other night, making a fortune off the hysteria that the blade runner had caused. It had a fuckable mouth, ass, and cock. That'd been a hell of a thing to see spread across twenty stories down the street from KD6-11.2. At least the cock hadn't looked much like his.

Tonight's auction items were tech and jewels, which was mostly what the auction house sold. He'd just turned back from scanning the street for trouble when an obscenely huge ruby was replaced with a collection of model animals. A lion, some kind of long-necked goat, and a striped horse.

The horse was only on the building for a second, but it stunned him. That horse… He remembered it. Not that exact one. His hadn't been striped. Its body was smooth, and hard, and it warmed in his small hand. He'd been… five years old, maybe. And that horse had been all he'd had in the world.

He hadn't made that memory himself, but it felt like his own. His little fingers had clenched around the horse when the boys at the orphanage tried to take it from him. His fingers had never been that small. The furnace where he'd hidden it was dark, and it echoed, and it smelled like dry death. He'd never been there. The beating afterward had cracked the child's ribs. KD6-11.2's ribcage had always been too strong for children's feet to harm him.

He steadied himself with a gloved hand on the hotel's wall. There'd been numbers, under the horse's back hooves: 06-10-21. A lock combination? A date? A password? And he'd never really seen it. It felt so strange, claiming this memory that was, and wasn't, his.

Deep breath in, deep breath out. He scanned the street to see if he'd missed anything while he'd been reminiscing about the childhood he never had. Rain poured down. The model animals were gone from the ad down the street, replaced with a chunk of orange rock described as "pure and uncut." It'd switch to the third ad in the cycle soon.

Humans never had to deal with shit like this.

\--

Night after night, KD6-11.2 watched the auction ads and the street outside the hotel. There were no more model animals, but he kept thinking about the horse. What if it was still there, in that furnace, wherever it was? What if he could find it?

Of course he couldn't find it. It wasn't as if he could afford a vacation. He barely made rent last month, and he'd had to stop drinking for the last week to do it. The revolutionaries had meticulously crafted this identity. He was grateful, he really was.

But what if the numbers under the hooves meant something?

He gave his two-week's notice. If he was going to give up his new life in Los Angeles, he was going to do it in a way that left him a chance to come back.

\--

KD6-11.2's revolutionary contact worked the counter at a junk shop in one of the many nasty parts of town. He'd come in civilian clothes, missing his armor with every step.

When he pushed through the creaking shop door, she looked up wearily from behind the counter. The shelf lighting around the walls made the metal and plastic scrap displayed there look less valuable rather than more.

Rianna was a beautiful human, beneath the soot and grease and scars she gained by doing what she did, where she did it. Her black and blood-red hair coiled around her face despite the cloth she wrapped it in. It was one of many things KD6-11.2 liked about her.

He pushed his hood back to expose his eyes above his air filtration mask. Nexus 9 KDs all had the same intensely blue eyes as his.

The dim light made her slow to recognize what he was. When she did, she just about blew his head off with a shotgun as big around as her arm. He flinched.

"You here to hurt or kill me?" She could ask plainly. Nexus 9s never lied.

"No."

That wasn't a good enough answer, since she kept gun aimed at his face. "You here to spy for the cops?"

"No."

Finally, she pointed the shotgun at the cement floor, and the hard line of her mouth softened. "You all right?"

KD6-11.2 swallowed the fear still shaking through him. "I think so, but I need help."

 She nodded, and her black and red hair bobbed as if in agreement. "We do that here. Have you come to us before?"

KD6-11.2 tried not to take her unfamiliarity personally. He and the rest of the Nexus 9 KDs looked identical. And maybe other Nexus 9s had survived, and were living among humans, like him. That was a nice thought. He tried not to take it personally, but it felt like a slap in the face. "Yes. You made my ID."

"Huh." Rianna hit a button that turned off the flashing red OPEN sign outside, then beckoned him toward the back of the shop. "What name did we give you?"

"Koller, Johannes."

"Koller. We must've been feeling dramatic when we picked that one." She shook her head, coiled hair swishing across the dark skin of her shoulders that her shirt left exposed. "You still think of yourself as your serial number, don't you. KD something, right?"

"KD6-11.2."  

"Same model _and_ same line as the blade runner?" Rianna opened a door to a stairwell, and he followed her down. The basement was half workshop, half computer lab, and all dusty. He was glad for his filtration mask. "Sucks to be you."

She still didn't remember him. She must've seen a lot of Nexus 9 KDs, in the nights after the blade runner went rogue. Meeting her was starting to feel disjointed, unsupported in time and in her reality. But he had his new ID as proof, and he'd made this memory himself. It was different than the horse.

"Tabi, we got a repeat customer," Rianna called toward the workshop half of the basement.

A head with huge goggles and bright green hair popped up from behind a machine. "Kon'nichiwa!" the woman called. She ducked behind the machine again, and then stepped around it to catch the shotgun Rianna threw to her.

"She's going to watch our backs," Rianna said. "You're safe here. Don't worry about a thing." Tabi smiled at KD6-11.2 and snapped the gum she was chewing, then climbed the stairs.

It took a while for KD6-11.2 to explain what he wanted. Rianna let him take his time. "That orphanage sounds like a bad place, K. We got you a nice safe place at the Algernon. Why do you want to go to that trash heap?"

Hearing her reference his number was a surprising relief. She may not have remembered him, but she understood what he was. And she still wanted to help him. "Didn't you ever look around and think that there could be _more_ to the world than what you're seeing? Something important?" he asked. "Didn't you ever wonder, 'Is this all there is?'" He shut his mouth before he pointed out that the shop they sat in was a boring, dirty, miserable stain in a dirty, miserable city, and neither it nor his job at the Algernon was that much better than a trash heap.

She stared at him for a moment. "Why do you think I joined up?"

He didn't know what to say to that. He waited.

After another moment, Rianna sighed. "You let me know if you make it back to town. We were going to tap you for something when the time was right. You make it back, I want to hook you up with my cell."

"Cells," KD6-11.2 mumbled, ashamed, unable to stop himself. The test would've shown that he was unmeasurably far off baseline. He hadn't taken a baseline test in weeks. Maybe she hadn't heard.

If Rianna did hear him, she ignored him and started typing on her keyboard. How many Nexus 9s had repeated the same words he had? Had they all suffered the same indignities, or had each of their questions been unique?

Knowing the humans who gave the tests, the questions were the same. Nexus 9 KDs were, of course, identical. Except for the blade runner.

The typing ceased. "I've got a place that matches your description. Someone will come and pick you up," Rianna said. "But I can't pay for them to take you all the way there. They'll drop you on the outskirts. After that, you're on your own."

\--

Since KD6-11.2 had turned in his armor and gun when he quit his job, the journey to the orphanage was a long, hard hike with a heavy backpack of supplies. A few gangs tried to stop him, but they were human. They didn't stand a chance.

He approached the door in the overturned satellite dish that served as the orphanage's entrance, then paused. The air here… even under the garbage stench, he thought he smelled the furnace's dry death.

Since this was the first time he had been here, the fact that he didn't recognize the man running the place made perfect sense.

The old guy's face fell when KD6-11.2 took off his mask, though. "Oh, you." He heaved a sigh. "You go through here. I'll show you."

The metal steps creaked the same way KD6-11.2 remembered. "I won't go down there," the old man said, and left before KD6-11.2 could ask why.

At least one Nexus 9 KD must've come here before. Would the horse still be there? If it was, KD6-11.2 would leave it where he found it. Let the others see for themselves.

Slowly, he descended the steps. It was even darker than he remembered.

And then, as he entered the area with the furnaces, with ash in every breath and fear in his heart, it wasn't. Floodlights lit and something struck him between the shoulder blades. He staggered forward. His muscles locked and he fell. His chin cracked against the floor.

Every muscle was tightening unbearably. He groaned, eyes squeezed shut, lips pulling back from his teeth. Footsteps were coming closer, and he couldn't get away.

Someone wedged a boot under KD6-11.2's shoulder and rolled him onto his back. The same boot shoved his mask down to rest against his throat. "Jesus, another one," a man's voice said. "You're a persistent bunch, ain't you?" A digital chirp echoed around the metal stairwell. "Yeah, that's right, I got another one." The footsteps paced away, then back. "Yeah, another nine, male. Come get it if you want it." The footsteps stopped. " _Tomorrow?_ The drug won't last 'til _tomorrow._ Christ. How about I, what do you say, 'retire' it. You can take the carcass _tomorrow_."

It was a trap. KD6-11.2 should've realized it when the old guy who ran the orphanage recognized him. The old guy was human, and most humans didn't help replicants. KD6-11.2's heart beat out of control, his chest heaving as hard as his strained muscles allowed. He was so far off baseline now. He was going to die that way.

He'd never know what the numbers under the horse's hooves meant. He'd never know if they were important.

"Yeah, okay, now we're talking," said the man who'd trapped him. "Add another five-hundred and you've… Okay, you've got a deal. Come get it tomorrow, usual place."

The digital chirp sounded again, above KD6-11.2's head. "Please," KD6-11.2 tried to say, but his jaw was clamped shut.

"No, you can't look for your sheep or whatever you come here for." The man kicked him in the side. It drove the breath from KD6-11.2's lungs. "Fucking skinjobs. Now I gotta find something to put you in."

\--

KD6-11.2 lay bound by his own muscles for what felt like hours. His captor dragged several heavy things past him, swore at the things or at him, and dragged them away again. Whatever the man had shot KD6-11.2 with kept him from opening his eyes to tell what those objects were.

 Later, the man rolled KD6-11.2 onto something that felt like metal grating. More metal slammed into his back, crushing his chest and arms against the grating beneath him. Things clanked beside his head, the man swore, and metal ratcheted down on KD6-11.2. Something above his breastbone gave way. He cried out in pain. The clanking stopped.

"Fucking finally." The man kicked KD6-11.2's knee, not hard enough to break it but hard enough to bruise. Footsteps retreated up the metal stairs.

KD6-11.2 couldn't move and couldn't see. His collar bone felt broken. The metal above and below him kept his chest from expanding much, leaving him breathing shallowly.

Someone was paying for replicants who remembered the toy horse to be caught and delivered alive. Wallace Corporation was the only entity that could benefit from that. And what they'd do with him, alive, didn't bear thinking about.

"A system of cells," KD6-11.2 whispered. His mouth was almost working again, and reciting the baseline calmed him. It was meant to. "Cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem."

\--

At some point, KD6-11.2 slept. He awoke to gunfire.

The burst that woke him was the longest, followed by a protracted exchange, and a small explosion. Then, nothing.

When he tried to move his arm, metal stopped him before the pain did. He turned his head until it, too, hit metal. His knees bent, but he couldn't stand. "Who's there?" he shouted into the bright light.

"Kare wa soko ni iru!" said a woman.

"Where? On the floor?" said another.

The second woman was… "Rianna?"

Footsteps lighter than his captor's clattered down the metal steps. From his position on his stomach, all he could see was her boots. "Yeah, but don't call me that out here. That's my Los Angeles name. Oh, K." He couldn't turn his head to see what she was doing. Something clanked, and the weight on his chest lifted. Dry air flooded his lungs and set him coughing. "You have some bad, bad luck."

Once he had the breath for it, he asked "How did you know I--" More coughing took his voice before he had to find words for what'd happened to him.

"I talked to the pilot when she came back from dropping you off," Rianna said. "You were the fourth blue-eyed man she brought here." The woman Rianna worked with, Tabi, bounced down the stairs on neon green boots that matched her hair. She rested their huge shotgun on her shoulder and said something KD6-11.2 didn't catch. "Yeah, it was all kinds of suspicious," Rianna agreed. "Help me with him."

Each woman grasped an arm and heaved up. KD6-11.2 yelped at the pain in his chest and scrambled to get his feet under him. Tabi let go right away, but Rianna held on. "Can you walk up the stairs?"

"Yes, but… May I have a moment?"

Rianna nodded at him and released his arm. He turned back to the furnace. Despite the bright light overhead, shadows still clung to it. The place where the horse was hidden was in the back, and he almost had to crawl to reach it, as his aching muscles screamed in protest.

The iron door to its hiding place stood open. The cloth that'd protected it lay on a pile of soot. It was empty.

At least now, he knew. Nothing important waited for him here. If he wanted to be part of something that mattered, he'd have to find it for himself, without another person's memories to guide his way.

KD6-11.2 returned to Rianna and Tabi, holding his arm against his side, where it made his chest hurt least. "You mentioned a revolutionary cell in Los Angeles?" _Cells,_ he thought but didn't say.

Rianna and Tabi grinned. "Thought you'd never ask," said Rianna. "Let's go introduce you."

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from ["Pale Fire" by Vladimir Nabokov](http://www.shannonrchamberlain.com/palefirepoem.html), from which some lines of K's post-trauma baseline test are taken. This story makes the following unsupported assumptions: That there are multiple Nexus 9s that look like Officer K, that KD references K's model, and that K did not choose his own baseline.


End file.
